Hi there, good people :)I am happy to go on with my Meet the Linguist series and I would like you to meet Sergey Bessonov! Here's how Sergey describes himself: "Active, young and constantly developing interpreter and translator. New challenging projects are welcome". I had a chance to see the amount of energy and enthusiasm Sergey puts into his work during the three-week course for Russian translators I taught back in April. You can follow Sergey on Twitter (@sergeybessonov) or become his fan on Facebook. As usual, I asked Sergey to answer a few questions. Here are his replies:

Happy Sunday everybody! Have you noticed how quickly the summer is flying by? I can't believe it's August already. Very soon kids in Russia will start a new school year, and their freelancing parents will move to the normal crazy schedule built around school, after-class activities, sports clubs etc. Fun! ;)

It is also high time I shared some top tweets shared last month about translation, languages, marketing and freelancing! Just a little reminder: this list has nothing to do with my personal favorits. Every month I visit topsy.com and find the most trending tweets on the topics mentioned above. In other words, those are the tweets that get most retweets, favorits and mentions. And then I publish them in my blog. I preserve all hashtags, so you can go to Twitter, type the hashtag in the search field and see what other people publish on the same topic. I also preserve the names and Twitter handles of people who publish those tweets, so you could check out their profiles and fo…

I am still getting feedback from colleagues all over the world after publishing the post about 10 business mistakes I made as a startup freelance translator. And one of the things I hear a lot is that there aren't enough possibilities for beginners to build their portfolio and grow in their skills, because good clients want experienced translators. As a result, they have to make their rates as low as possible to get a project and thus gain some experience.

I strongly disagree with this practice, though I made this mistake, too, in the beginning. However, there's a chance for you now to start your career differently. True, you won't earn much at first. Nobody does anyway. But you will do work that matters. Besides, you can list this experience in your CV and LinkedIn profile.

The possibility I am talking about is volunteering for different non-profit organizations and projects in different parts of the world. I started cooperating with NGOs and donating my translation serv…